: Traditions

What do a firework and a painting from a medieval church have in common?

Medieval wall painting of St Catherine, from St Teilos church, dating to around 1400.

In 1998 St Fagans National History Museum began the challenging work of rebuilding and refurbishing a stone-built medieval church that had been moved from its original site in west Wales in 1984 — one of the first projects of its kind to be attempted in Europe. During the dismantling process, a number of extremely rare wall paintings were uncovered from beneath the limewashed walls.

St Catherine

One of the oldest paintings uncovered at the church dates from around 1400-1430 and represents St Catherine of Alexandria. It had remained hidden for centuries under layers of limewash, which had to be removed using doctors' scalpels.

Once the complete image had been painstakingly uncovered and the many thin layers of limewash delicately removed, St Catherine was revealed dressed in late fourteenth/early fifteenth-century costume, standing next to a spiked wheel and holding a sword.

Torture wheel and sword

Close up showing detail of St Catherine's face after conservation and cleaning by Jane Rutherfoord & Associates Ltd of Milton Lilbourne, Wilts. The work involved removing the backing that had been applied during initial conservation work in 1986, and replacing it with a modern high-tec solution based on hexlite - a lightweight aluminium hollow board used in aircraft manufacture. The surface was then cleaned to reveal the original paintwork.

The spiked wheel she is pictured next to is the instrument of torture that Catherine was condemned to death on by the Roman Emperor Maxentius [306-312] for her strong Christian beliefs. According to legend, the wheel itself broke when she touched it, so she was beheaded with the sword she is seen holding.

The torturous wheel that St Catherine is associated with gave rise to the name 'Catherine wheel' for the popular firework.

The re-erected church can be seen at St Fagans National History Museum. The wall paintings have been faithfully and expertly reproduced to show how the church would have appeared in about 1530. The St Catherine painting is not represented in the re-erected building, as it would have been covered over by this time.

The original wall painting of St Catherine is currently stored at the museum and can be viewed upon request in advance.

The image of the 'Welsh Lady', in a tall black hat, red shawl and flannel skirt is very well known. It has become the national costume of Wales. But how does it compare with what was really worn in the past?

Watercolour sketch of Welsh woman knitting, showing footless stockings, mid-19th century

What is a national costume?

Historians have to use a variety of different information to piece together what people actually wore every day. The created a national costume from clothing worn by women in the countryside. This image has ensured the survival of many elements of real Welsh dress.

Early sources of information

In order to discover the true nature of rural dress within Wales during the 18th and 19th centuries, it is necessary to investigate sources from the time. For the earlier period, the main sources are manuscript and published accounts, diaries and letters of travellers to Wales, together with paintings produced by artists who journeyed through Wales.

From the 1830s, there are more frequent accounts from those who lived in Wales, and who had an interest in the Welsh language and traditional ways of life, not only artists and historians, but also enthusiasts such as Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover.

Mass tourism

Later in the century, the arrival of the railways brought the beginning of mass tourism, which generated souvenir prints, china and, finally, postcards. Fortunately, there were also numerous photographers with a real interest in traditional culture, rural crafts and agriculture. They have recorded a lost society, and, incidentally, their clothing. Finally, there is material culture; most of the existing garments in museum collections date from the middle of the 19th century onwards.

Approach with caution

All of these sources must be used with great caution. Most of the literary sources are outsiders' accounts which concentrate on the quaint and unusual. Paintings can be romanticised and photographs often staged. The huge interest in national identity at the beginning of the 19th century within Wales, which resulted in the creation of an artificial 'standard' national dress, has for many years hidden the true, varied image of the rural population.

Rural costume

Careful analysis however can provide evidence for the actual garments worn in everyday life, particularly with regard to working clothes. It is certainly possible to identify elements of rural dress, such as the general use of woollen fabric and the wearing of aprons, kerchiefs and men's hats. Some of this survived as part of rural dress even into the twentieth century.

Workwear or national costume?

Only aprons and shawls have survived in any number. Dresses and skirts were usually worn out or re-used as rags. This is hardly surprising when one considers the condition of some of those depicted in photographs. A number of flannel petticoats, however, have survived, perhaps because, as undergarments, they were protected by skirts. Many of these are kept in museum collections as examples of 'Welsh costume'. They are in fact not garments belonging to a conscious 'national' dress at all, but real 'peasant' or rural dress, part of the flannel-wearing tradition.

The forecourt and chamber of Tinkinswood (Vale of Glamorgan). Built in the Cotswold-Severn style, the chamber of this impressive monument can still be visited today. Image: Cadw (Crown Copyright).

Imaginative reconstruction of a burial ceremony at Tinkinswood, by Alan Sorrell.

Ground plan of tomb at Gwernvale (Powys). This plan of the tomb is typical of the Cotswold-Severn type, although in this case the chambers are not accessed from the forecourt, but from the sides of the tomb.

Bowl from Ty-Isaf (Powys). 24.6cm (9.8 inches) in diameter. Found in fragments, this simple bowl is more typical of the grave goods offered at this time.

6,000 years ago small farming communities began to build tombs that continued to be used for hundreds of years - many survive to this day.

Stone Age tombs are relatively common in Wales. These 6,000 year old monuments consist of one or more chambers constructed from massive stones (megaliths). These were originally covered by a mound of earth or stones, although this rarely survives.

Many of these tombs were made to a common design, and in south-east Wales this often takes the form of mounds where the wider end points eastwards and opening to a forecourt. The internal chambers are accessed by short passages leading from the forecourt or the sides of the mound.

This design also appears throughout the Cotswolds (England), and beside the River Severn giving rise to the archaeological name Cotswold-Severn tombs.

Excavation at Cotswold-Severn tombs such as Gwernvale (Powys) have shown that they were sometimes built over earlier settlements, suggesting it was important that the dead be buried on land once occupied by the living.

At Pipton and Ty-Isaf (both in Powys) archaeologists have also discovered that some tombs were built in stages, often with a smaller monument being incorporated into a larger design.

The end product can be massive, for example Penywyrlod, Talgarth (Powys). It is likely that these grand houses for the dead were intended to stake a claim to a territory, emphasising to passers-by that the land was taken.

Once built Cotswold-Severn tombs were used for generations. For example, bodies were interred at Parc le Breos Cwm (Gower) for over five hundred years. This site gives us a glimpse of the burial rituals at these tombs, with some bodies apparently having been kept outside the tomb until they had partially decomposed - a practice which sounds gruesome today, but appears to have been a common part of the burial rite at this time.

When abandoned Cotswold-Severn tombs often held the remains of a large number of people. At Parc le Breos Cwm archaeologists found more than 40 bodies, while at Ty-Isaf and Tinkinswood (Vale of Glamorgan) over 30 and 50 were found respectively.

The fragmentary nature of these bodies suggests that it was not the individual burial that was important to the tomb builders, but the creation of an ancestral bone pile.

Few grave goods are found in these tombs, at most a few broken pots and a handful of flint tools. It is likely that what ceremony occurred to honour the dead took place outside of the chambers.

Together, the bones, grave goods and the tombs themselves provide one of the main sources of information about life and death in south-east Wales during this remote period.

Background Reading

The Tomb Builders: In Wales 4000-3000BC by Steve Burrow. National Museum Wales Books (2006)

The megalithic chambered tombs of the Cotswold-Severn region by T. C. Darvill. Vorda Publications (1982).

Common Culture

Bryn Celli Ddu (Anglesey) is one of the best preserved passage tombs in Wales. Image: Cadw (Crown copyright).

5,500 years ago a common culture spread around the Atlantic coast of Europe linking Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, southern Scotland and Ireland.

Today, evidence of this culture survives in the form of passage tombs - circular burial mounds pierced by stone-lined passages that open into central chambers.

Stone Age Crematoriums

Plan of Bryn Celli Ddu showing the passage way leading into the centre of the circular mound.

These tombs were built by early farming communities to house the cremated remains of their dead and were used for generations. They must have been important landmarks that linked the living with their ancestors.

Within Wales, passage tombs are best seen on Anglesey where two important examples are sufficiently well-preserved to allow public access - Barclodiad y Gawres and Bryn Celli Ddu.

Barclodiad y Gawres ('the apronful of the giantess') was built with a main chamber flanked by three side-chambers in which the dead would have been placed. In the centre of the main chamber was a hearth from which a fire would have illuminated the tomb during rituals.

Witches brew and spiral artwork

Carved stone inside the chamber of Barclodiad y Gawres (Anglesey). The style of carving in this passage tomb is common to many tombs in Ireland.

To the surprise of the archaeologists excavating the site, the hearth contained a strange mix of reptile, fish and amphibian bones. While the reason for this 'witches brew' will never be known, one important insight into the culture of these tomb builders is the strange artwork that is pecked into the rocks that line the passage and chamber. These designs include spirals and strange meandering zig-zag patterns.

On their own they might be dismissed as a whim of the builders, but this type of design is also found within other passage tombs as far afield as Ireland and Brittany.

A similarly patterned stone was found at Bryn Celli Ddu (Anglesey). However, here the stone was discovered lying face down in a pit beneath the tomb's chamber where it must have been buried before tomb building began. Was it buried in order to sanctify the site, or was it buried to hide it away? - another unanswered mystery.

The passage tombs on Anglesey are not the only ones in Wales. Other examples are known from Gwynedd and Pembrokeshire, although these are less well-preserved.

Grand ambitions

Decorated stone found beneath Bryn Celli Ddu (Anglesey). 1.5m (4.9 feet) high. The swirling patterns on this stone are typical of passage tomb art.

The largest and most complex passage tombs occur in Ireland. The tombs at Newgrange and Knowth show how grand the ambitions of the tomb builders could be.

At Knowth the central tomb is accompanied by a cemetery of at least 18 smaller examples, while at Newgrange skilled engineers precisely aligned the passage way with the mid-winter sunrise.

In all of the areas where passage tombs appear they are built to slightly different designs, but there is sufficient similarity between them all to indicate that the Irish Sea was a thriving highway at the end of the Stone Age, with communities from Brittany to Scotland sharing both ideas and ways of respecting the dead.

Background Reading

Newgrange, Co. Meath (Ireland), with pit circle in foreground. The reconstructed passage tomb at Newgrange is one of several massive tombs in the Boyne Valley. Image © Steve Burrow.

The Tomb Builders: In Wales 4000-3000BC by Steve Burrow. National Museum Wales Books (2006)

Barclodiad y Gawres: the excavation of a megalithic chamber tomb in Anglesey, 1952-1953 by T. G. E. Powell and G. E. Daniel. Liverpool University Press (1956).

Irish Passage Graves: Neolithic tomb builders in Ireland and Britain 2500BC by M. Herity. Dublin University Press (1974).

'The chambered cairn of Bryn Celli Ddu' by W. J. Hemp. In Archaeologia Cambrensis vol. 86, p216-58 (1931).

Megalithic Tombs

Pentre Ifan (Pembrokeshire), one of the most dramatic megalithic tombs in Wales. It would originally have been covered by a stone mound.

Wales is home to one of the best collections of megalithic tombs in the UK. As well as being visually dramatic, they provide an important source of information about life, and death, from over five thousand years ago.

The landscape of Wales is filled with ancient monuments. A thousand years ago castles were the most impressive features, a thousand years before that it was Roman forts and before that Iron Age hillforts. But the earliest monuments to survive to the present day are megalithic tombs - stone burial chambers, built almost six thousand years ago.

Megalithic tombs were built at a time when the population of Wales lived in small communities, using stone tools, and experimenting with the newly introduced ways of farming and herding. Today such a life sounds simple and unsophisticated compared to our own. However, the evidence of the megalithic tombs tells us that life was not completely uncomplicated at this time.

Wales's megalithic tombs consist, for the most part, of stone chambers composed of a large capstone perched on top of a number of uprights. These would once have been covered with a mound of earth or stone. Often they have a forecourt area in which ceremonies would have been performed.

The scale of the megaliths is their most striking feature. At Arthur's Stone on the Gower peninsula a rock over 4m (14ft) long and 2m (7ft) thick was lifted to create the chamber. At Tinkinswood (Vale of Glamorgan) a slab weighing over 36 tonnes (39 tons) was used.

Community crypts

Reconstruction of daily life in Wales 6,000 years ago, based on excavations at Clegyr Boia (Pembrokeshire). For most people the daily routine focused on farming crops, gathering wild plants, and herding sheep and cattle.

That Stone Age people went to such lengths to build their tombs indicates their importance for communities at this time.

When completed the tomb functioned like a modern crypt, being slowly filled over the generations with the dead. The result was, in effect, a home for the ancestors.

South East Wales

Drawing of Dyffryn Ardudwy (Gwynedd), by David Gunning. This monument was constructed in stages with the chamber on the right being the first to be built.

Tombs like these can be found in many parts of Wales. In south-east Wales there is an important group of tombs centred on the Black Mountains as well as in the Vale of Glamorgan. In south-west Wales, there are clusters in Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire. Most impressive of all are the tombs of Anglesey, which are notable for their number and variety.

These tombs are the few that have survived agricultural clearance and robbing for building works - doubtless there were once many more in Wales, and perhaps there are a few more still waiting to be discovered.

Background Reading

Arthur's Stone, on the Gower peninsula. The massive stone that caps this chamber was set atop several smaller uprights in an impressive feat of Stone Age engineering.

The Tomb Builders: In Wales 4000-3000BC by Steve Burrow. National Museum Wales Books (2006)

Megalithic tombs and long barrows in Britain by F. Lynch. Shire Publications (1997).